Rosh Hashanah apple cards made with cork stamps

Looking for a fun and easy Rosh Hashanah card craft? This is a variation on an activity I saw on the Challah Crumbs website. Basically it involves printing apples using the usefully circular nature of the end of a cork. This may be easier said than done if you don’t drink wine – or even if you do, given how much less common wine bottles with corks are these days. It might be time to pop that bottle of champagne you’ve been saving for the right occasion.🙂

Fortunately for me, I saved a bunch of corks some years ago with the plan of making an entire pinboard out of recycled corks. The pinboard never eventuated, but the corks were still hanging around. (Yes, I am that sort of person who finds it hard to throw things away, how did you guess?)

Rather than keeping the corks completely round, I used a cutting blade to take out two small chunks to mimic the dimples at the top and base of an apple. The stems are just added in pen afterwards.

Not that you can see it clearly, but I’ve carved two dimples into each “apple”.

Corks are not uniformly flat, especially once you’ve impaled them with a corkscrew, but this adds to their charm in my opinion. I initially tested my cork stamps with ink pads, and I really liked the result. The handwritten Hebrew letters are less of a feature, but I was making this in a rush as a demonstration model for a class of children who were not going to be critical (thankfully!) I gave them some Hebrew alef-bet stencils and they enjoyed finding the right letters for their own cards.

We don’t have colourful inkpads at cheder, so there we used paint. It worked fine, but if you are doing this activity with kids then I recommend you have a scrap sheet of paper or cardboard where kids can stamp first to lose some excess paint prior to stamping their Rosh Hashanah card. This is because if you have too much paint on the end of your cork, you end up with a blob which looks less like an apple and more like somebody stepped on a paint bug and squished it to the page.

The advantage of paint is that you can end up with mixed colours which look fabulous, as my daughter demonstrates above.

Rosh Hashanah is in less than two weeks, so I foresee more cork stamping at home this weekend!

Update: I made cards for family on the other side of the country using ink, with a stamped greeting in the middle. I was pretty happy with how they turned out. It’s not so obvious from this photo, but the metallic gold apples looked great.